Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve a proxying network arrangement, where a node on the network forwards traffic on behalf of a source. As a first example, in a virtual private network, a source in an unsecured environment (e.g., a public wireless network) may send network requests to a proxy in a secured environment (e.g., a trusted home or organization network). By sending the requests in an encrypted manner to the proxy, and by configuring the proxy to resend the requests, the source may achieve the transmission of requests as if they had originated at the proxy within the trusted environment, and may avoid the eavesdropping vulnerabilities of sending traffic in an unencrypted manner from the unsecured environment. As a second example, in an anonymizing proxy network, it may be desirable to send traffic that is untraceable back to the source of the traffic. Therefore, one or more proxies may be configured to receive traffic from various sources and to retransmit the traffic without retaining records as to the identity of the source. In one such scenario, a large body of nodes may be configured to exchange anonymized traffic, such that a request may be traced back to one of the many nodes that automatically forward requests, but may not be traced further back to the source of the request.
Also within the field of computing, many scenarios involve an attempt to examine a content source, such as a server of software or information. This examination is often performed in an automated manner; e.g., a “crawler” application may be configured to request a first content set (e.g., a first web page provided by a webserver), to identify content sets that are associated with the first content set (e.g., other web pages and resource that are hyperlinked within the first web page), and to request and examine the associated content sets in an iteratively expanding examination. As one such scenario, a malware reporting server may be configured to examine various web resources that are reported as suspicious (e.g., particular devices, domains, websites, services, or resources), and may do so by “crawling” associated websites and resources that are suspected of providing suspicious and potentially malicious content. By “crawling” these websites, the malware reporting service may identify resources that are associated with a resource that is identified as malicious (e.g., finding other resources that interoperate with the malicious resource or other websites that feature similar malicious content).